With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe the west has been confronted with the existence of several, little-understood Muslim ethnic groups in this region whose contested histories can be traced back to the Ottoman period and beyond. Previously overlooked Muslim ethnies, such as the Bulgarian Turks, Bosniaks, Pomaks, Kosovars, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars, have begun to receive considerable attention from both western scholars and the general public. Much of the interest revolves around the question of the identity of these Muslim communities and the history of their formation as distinct ethnic groups. The history of the formation of these groups has in many cases been contested terrain as Bulgarian authorities, for example, attempted in the 1980s to prove that the Bulgarian Turks were actually “Turkified Bulgarians”, as the Greek government sought to demonstrate that the Pomaks (Slavic Muslims) were actually Islamicized Greeks, and as Bosniaks were labelled “Turks” by their Serbian nationalist foes in spite of their Slavic background.

The revised text of the Charles Beckingham Memorial Lecture, Ibn Battūta and the Mongols, delivered to the Royal Asiatic Society on 13th January 2000 by D. O. Morgan.

This article provides, for the first time, a detailed and authentic account of the genesis and planning of the Somali Expedition, derived from previously unresearched documents in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library, and supplemented by material from the archives of the Royal Geographical Society. The author has sought to give the subject a wider historical perspective than that provided by Burton, by including details from the works of earlier travellers in the north-east region of Africa such as James Bruce, Lord Valentia, and Henry Salt, which, to a greater or lesser degree, have a bearing on Somalia. He has also touched on the ‘Eastern Question’, especially with regard to Muhammed Ali's territorial ambitions in Arabia, which was an important factor in the British decision to annex Aden in 1839, leading inevitably to the development of an important relationship, both commercial and strategic, with the Somali coast across the Gulf.

The article examines the material relating to the early reception of the eighteenth century Hindi poet Ānandghan (Ghanānand). Ānandghan's poetic ideas were not far from those expressed in Persian literature, popular at that time in India. Apart from an abundance of idiomatic usage and paradoxes his approach to love reflects his taste for Persian poetry: the beloved can be either a woman or an undefined God, or even Krishna. Ānandghan's ‘openness’ towards Persian poetry earned him disrepute. In this article three early schools of criticism of his quatrains are distinguished: those of his opponents, of his fellow-devotees and of Brajnāth, the secular connoisseur. All three parties expressed their views on Ānandghan through poetry sometimes employing bitter or pungent language.

The article offers a survey of religious contacts maintained between Tibet and Russian Buddhists, the ethnic Buryats and Kalmyks, from the late 19th C. to the 1930s. Chronologically, the story falls into two parts, the dividing point being the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The focus in the first portion is on the Russian Buddhist colony in Lhasa centred around the Gomang Datsang (school) of the Drepung monastery, its emergence and growth in the early 20th C., in the wake of Russo-Tibetan rapprochement brought about by a Buryat scholar-monk and adviser of the 13th Dalai Lama, Agvan Dorjiev. The tsarist government tried to use their Buddhist connection with Lhasa to political ends – in January 1904, shortly after the beginning of the British military invasion of Tibet, they sent a secret Kalmyk reconnaissance mission to Lhasa under a Cossack subaltern, Naran Ulanov, assisted by a cleric (bakshi) Dambo Ulianov. The latter part of the article concentrates on the dramatic post-revolutionary period. It begins with the story of the Kalmyk refugees in Turkey and their abortive attempt to emigrate to Tibet. There's also a detailed discussion of the endeavours by Soviet leaders to win the Dalai Lama over, by employing the loyal Buryats and Kalmyks for their secret missions to the Potala. The key figures behind this scheme were the Soviet foreign minister, G. V. Chicherin, and the same Agvan Dorjiev, posing as the Dalai Lama's representative in the USSR. As a result of the Bolshevik propaganda, many of the Buryat and Kalmyk residents in Lhasa began to return to their homeland in the 1920s. The crackdown on Buddhism in Soviet Russia put an end to the Moscow–Lhasa political dialogue. Hence all connections between the Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhists and their religious “Mecca” were deliberately cut by the Soviet authorities by 1930.

The article details the events and themes surrounding a strike and riot that transpired in colonial Bombay in 1832, led by a segment of the Parsi community and joined by other Indians, in reaction to the British cull of stray pariah dogs in the streets. The strike and riot demonstrated the commercial power of the Parsis to disrupt the daily routine of Bombay and exert their influence in hostility to colonial interference and incursions against Parsi (Indian) religious sensibilities. The Bombay dog riots of 1832 exposed the vulnerability of early British-Indian socio-political relations in Bombay and Western India in the face of popular disturbances against British authority and was in marked contrast to the state of Parsi-British relations that developed in the nineteenth century, as the Parsis led the process of Indian accommodation to British rule, tempered only by overt threats to their religious identity.

The campaign against thuggee in 1830s India produced a set of widely-circulated accounts of the origins and practices of thugs. In these works (both popular and scholarly), a very small amount of primary information was continually recycled throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The changes visible in the manner of deployment of this information are indicative of progressive re-formulations of the narrative of the history of thuggee, and the larger history of British India. This process is examined through a study of the incorporation of an extract from The Travels of M de Thévenot into the Levant into the historical archive, which concludes that any re-appraisal of history must incorporate a consideration of the narrative underlying the production of the records, as well as the records themselves.

The Pudu Mandapa (‘New Hall’) in Madurai is one of the best-known monuments from the Nayaka period of Tamilnadu (c. 1550–1700). It was built around 1630 under the patronage of Tirumala Nayaka as a major addition to the Minaksi-Sundaresvara temple complex that dominates the centre of this major Tamil town and Hindu pilgrimage centre. The Pudu Mandapa is well known in the West from the aquatint produced by Thomas and William Daniell, but this is only one of numerous other illustrations by Western and Indian artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century of this single Tamil temple structure. A discussion of the Pudu Mandapa as an example of a major architectural type, the festival mandapa, is followed by an examination of the structure's architectural sculpture. The final section discusses the Royal Asiatic Society's collection of drawings of this mandapa and the European documentation of the south Indian temple more generally.

Hugh Clifford has been described as “one of the most unusual colonial governors in British history”. Widely regarded as the “doyen of the colonial service”, Clifford held successive governorships in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Ceylon, and the Straits Settlements. As a writer of novels, short stories, and reminiscences, moreover, he enjoyed a successful literary career; he moved in literary circles and counted Joseph Conrad among his particular friends. Clifford's inspiration was drawn almost exclusively from his experiences in Malaya, the territory where he not only started his career in the early 1880s, but also ended it in tragic circumstances nearly fifty years later. Throughout his Malayan career Clifford came into frequent contact with Malaya's ruling families. “To act the part of officer in attendance upon Malayan royalties is a task with which circumstances have familiarised me”, he declared in “Piloting Princes”, a 1902 contribution to Blackwood's Magazine. His attitude towards them ranged from disgust and condemnation, to admiration and a paternalistic concern for their dignity and survival. Unravelling Clifford's complex, and apparently contradictory, relationship with Malay royalty will be the subject of this article.

The Buddhist saints, that are the subject of this article, are known from a series of inscribed reliquaries collected by Alexander Cunningham and F. C. Maisey at Sanchi and neighbouring sites in central India. The inscriptions, dating to the circa early first century BC, have been known since readings of them were first published the mid-nineteenth century. The detailed re-examination of the records presented in this article shows that the reliquary inscriptions give special prominence to five Buddhist saints. The names given correspond to the five missionaries who, according to Pali sources, were sent to the Himalayan region at the time of the Third Council in the mid-third century BC. This indicates that (a) the Hemavata school was responsible for the re-vitalization of Sanchi in the post-Mauryan period and (b) that there was a well-established tradition about the nature of the Third Council in the first century BC.

The previously unpublished text of a letter written by John Osterwick in Hirado to Richard Fursland, President of the Council of Defence, around the end of September 1621. Its value lies in the detail which it provides of the state of the English East India Company's factory in Japan, eight years after it was established and two years before it closed.